Blogs

August 19, 2017 – The greatest security threats to the United States are not from nuclear weapons but from cyber space and domestic terrorism. The Russian interference in the 2016 elections through email hacking and domestic terrorism by white nationalists in Charlottesville, VA are manifestations of the real threats to our security and the union.

Excerpts from my book, The Beltway Beast, published in 2014

While Washington continues to fight its previous, ongoing wars, the real threats of the 21st century will not be meeting us at the Khyber Pass in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Our greatest threats will come from cyberspace and domestic terrorism, not the ones we currently attribute to the Muslims, but the ones that we have not even started thinking about….More

August 19, 2016 – The middle class is getting crushed. But there is hope. The most common argument about the middle class destruction is the declining or stagnant income, which is true. However, the main culprits are the costs of healthcare, education, and housing that have increased at a much higher rate, making it impossible for an average American family to attain a middle-class lifestyle (see chart below). Furthermore, the tax policies have exacerbated the problem by creating after-tax income and wealth inequality, favoring the non-working income taxed at a lower rate than the working income. Despite the doom and gloom about the middle class making headlines, there are three major forces working together—women, millennials, and technology, which provide hope for the future….More

February 5, 2014 – We were led to believe that the Affordable Care Act will take care of 47 million uninsured Americans when it comes to their healthcare. According to the 2010 projections by the Centers for Medicine and Medicaid Services (CMS), 14 million Americans will enroll in 2014 in the new Health Insurance Exchanges. That would still leave 33 million Americans uninsured by the end of this year.

Yet even that modest forecast has already been reduced by half, with the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projecting that just 7 million Americans will enroll this year. So that will leave some 40 million Americans uninsured. These figures are well short of the goal of delivering affordable health care to all…More

December 5, 2013 – Our handling of the national debt is like a grand, inter-generational Ponzi scheme that’s destined to drown our children and grandchildren in red ink. Our leaders like to call their strategy borrowing, but it is really tantamount to stealing — from our children, worse yet. Why? Because we have no plans to pay the debt. None. We continue to borrow just to make interest payments that are estimated to be $5 trillion over the next decade while doing nothing to pay down a staggering debt of $17 trillion.

Equally alarming, perhaps even surreal, is that party leaders who can hardly agree on the color of the White House can be found nodding their approval at the fiscal fiction “that deficits don’t matter,” as then-Vice President Dick Cheney told a disbelieving Paul O’Neill, the treasury secretary at the time…More

November 22, 2013 – One looming issue that President Obama did not address in last week’s press conference about the latest technical and bureaucratic snafus with the Affordable Care Act has to do with the act’s heavy reliance on America’s younger generation. Without young, mostly healthy people pouring money into the new insurance pool, the Affordable Care Act would not be, well, affordable.

“This only works,” as former President Bill Clinton said recently, “if young people show up.” President Barack Obama, seated beside the former POTUS at a recent Clinton Global Initiative event, concurred: “The way pools work, any pool, is essentially those of us who are healthy subsidize somebody who’s sick, at any given time. We do that because we anticipate at some point we’ll get sick and we hope that the healthy person is in our pool so those costs and those risks get spread. That’s what insurance is all about.”…More